Ralph Breaks the Internet (And His Own Political Career)

Ralph Northam, the until-recently esteemed Democratic governor of Virginia, was in enough trouble last week when he backed a bill in the Virginia state legislature allowing for abortions all the way up to the third trimester of a pregnancy.  A pediatric neurologist, Northam went on the radio to explain the bill from a medical standpoint as a way of defending it, but he failed to convince abortion opponents and any pro-choice person who's squeamish over late-term procedures of his argument.  Right now, he probably wishes he were still discussing the issue, thanks to his entry in the 1984 yearbook from Eastern Virginia Medical School.

Yes, one of the pictures in his yearbook entry is a picture of two guys in what seems to be a promotional picture for a student production of a stage version of Birth Of a Nation - one guy in blackface, the other in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.  After conceding that he might be one of the guys in that photo, Northam reversed course and said he was absolutely certain that neither one of them was him.

The guy posing in front of the Corvette, on the other hand, is clearly Northam himself.

This yearbook entry raises some obvious questions.  If neither one of those two guys is Northam, why is the picture in his yearbook entry?  Why was a racist burlesque considered normal in mid-eighties Virginia?  And why do medical schools have yearbooks?

But a more important question than that is why Northam thinks anyone would buy his argument that he's not one of those masked men in the racist photo and that the photo was placed there by mistake. I'm surprised he didn't try to say that it's really a picture of a costume party in which the guy on the left is dressed as Marcel Marceau and the guy on the right is dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come . . . and what we're looking at here is actually the negative!

Northam delivered an oddly surreal statement at a press conference on Saturday in which he tried to defuse the scandal and insisted that he is not now the person he was in his youth (what sort of person was he, then?) and that he will continue to work hard against racism and strive to regain the trust of the people of Virginia.  He might as well have read a chapter of "Trout Fishing In America," or maybe the owner's manual from that old Corvette, for all of the good it did him.  And in an effort to show just how candid he is, he admitted to darkening his face when he dressed up like Michael Jackson to enter a dance contest that he ultimately won.  

Because he did such a great moonwalk.

And Northam's suggestion that the photo was someone else's, placed on his yearbook page due to a yearbook editor's mistake?  Right.  Listen, I worked on my yearbook in college (though a piece I wrote about jazz music on campus was dropped), and I know the difference between a mistake and a disaster.  In my senior yearbook from 1988, a feature looking back at the events of the time erroneously identified Democratic presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt as a U.S. Senator from Arizona; he was in fact the state's former governor.  That was a mistake.  However, I know of no picture from one student that got placed in the yearbook entry of another.  Northam's comments sound more like an excuse than an explanation, and an excuse that does not ring true at that.

I give Northam a week at best before he is forced to resign, as Virginians of both parties are calling him to do.  He is constitutionally limited to one term, and there is no higher office for him to seek in 2021 or 2022, but he still has a lot to lose by staying in office.  So do Virginia Democrats and Democrats nationwide, who would rather be talking about health care and infrastructure than this.  Instead of focusing on the Mueller investigation or the abrupt cancellation of the IMF treaty, the press is discussing a Democratic governor's racist past.  It's no surprise that Terry McAuliffe, Northam's predecessor as governor of Virginia and a possible presidential candidate for 2020, has been among the most vocal of those demanding his resignation.  In fact, a week may be too generous; Northam may have already resigned by the time you read this. 

I think there are lessons to be learned here.  First of all, blackface is offensive in any context.  Second, you shouldn't make a bad situation worse by changing your story.  Third, if you're a white male who enters a dance contest and wants to dress like a contemporary celebrity known for dancing, John Travolta is a much better choice than Michael Jackson.

And no moonwalking.

Nice Corvette, though.

By The Yearbook

Last week I reflected on the dearth of intellectual rigor in the American higher education system. It got me thinking about all of the trappings of American college campuses commonly associated with high schools - varsity sports, cliques, and the like. It is indeed true that attending even one of the best colleges and universities in America is comparable to the high school experience, especially if you're a commuter who still lives at home. And nothing is more emblematic of that than the college yearbook.

What's the difference between high school yearbooks and college yearbooks? None, really. Both celebrate the various school clubs and organizations, both feature pictures of all the popular students, and both feature portraits of the graduating seniors with obvious memories and sentiments expressed underneath. I went to Drew University in New Jersey, and it's a serious place. There are few courses in its undergraduate college aimed at career development, and there are no fraternities and sororities - although some impudent alumni might suggest that the campus drama club is a sorority. It's a liberal arts school designed to train students how to think. Yet the yearbook contained irrefutable evidence that Drew is not immune from the influence of high schools.

My senior yearbook from 1988 will not disappoint those looking to find evidence of just how much of a high school ethos has permeated the college experience. The content focused on extracurricular campus events - always attended by the popular crowd - and its essays touched on trivia like clothes washing. The yearbook staff - to which, in full disclosure, I nominally belonged - tried something novel for the 1988 edition. Rather than show formal senior portraits in the middle of the book and casual photos of the seniors in the back, as had been the custom, they elected instead to put the formal senior portraits and the senior casual photos together in the back, with the middle pages devoted to semi-formal headshots of underclass students.

Looking back, this decision was clearly a disaster. The senior section was muddled beyond comprehension. Putting our formal portraits next to our causal shots was an erratic endeavor, as not all of the casual photos of us were all that good. For the casual photos, we had to get people to photograph us in everyday clothes. Some of the casual shots were terrific, and others were thoroughly awful - poorly focused, dimly lit, inartfully composed. (One girl submitted a picture of herself so poorly lit you can barely see her face!) Remember, this was 1988, before Photoshop. Getting a friend or a parent to take multiple pictures of us just to have one decent one to send in for use in the yearbook was a costly exercise. All of the casual shots had to be in black and white; this was also in the age before digital cameras that could shoot in black and white or color, and when color photography was the more accessible medium. I hadn't had black and white photos taken of me since I was a baby. Many students did opt to send in baby pictures of themselves, and one friend of mine even submitted a picture of his grandparents.

My own casual picture was one of the worse ones, I'm afraid. I got some freshman to photograph me in black and white for a nominal fee, and my father took a few more pictures of me with his camera. I must have had forty pictures of me taken between the two of them, but only one came out! The only surviving photograph of these sessions was a headshot, grainy and unfocused. In the photo, the collar of my windbreaker jacket, a Members Only (it was the eighties) imitation, is askew; I'm not wearing my glasses and I appear to be squinting. You can't tell where I am because the background is a blotch of gray. My formal photo turned out much better; it's probably one of the few times a formal yearbook photo came out better than the casual one!

The sentiments we expressed were just as embarrassing. Didn't we realize that this yearbook would be a part of our lives for the next fifty to sixty years? If we had pondered posterity, many of us might not have submitted rock and pop song lyrics for our favorite quotes. (I submitted lyric quotes from the Beatles and Pink Floyd.) Oh, some students did quote Montesquieu and Flaubert, showing off their newly acquired education (or their Francophilia), but seemingly half the class quoted Billy Joel songs.

Under our formal photos, we offered personal memories and thanks, sometimes in code (initials, et. al.) to preserve inside jokes and private sentiments. I made the egregious mistake of expressing thanks to a fellow senior for "being a wonderful friend," and I mentioned this person by name. Anyone could figure out who (and what) I was talking about. Then, a couple of months after we all got our yearbooks in the mail (after graduation), I had a face-to-face encounter with this person, who told me that we never really were friends and that we didn't really know each other. That was the last time I ever saw this person. Ironically, my misguided sentiment is there, in the class yearbook, for all eternity. Here's another irony - I don't refer to this person by name anymore.

The yearbook was elegantly bound, in padded, dark green faux leather, with the Drew crest embossed on it, along with the yearbook name - "Oak Leaves" - in a raised white font. (There were a lot of oak trees on the Drew campus.) Really classy, huh? Except that the green color started fading and flaking almost as soon as I got it, and the binding started to come undone after a year. Totally sloppy. Inside was more sloppiness. Current events of the 1987-88 school year were referred to on a couple of pages. One item referred to 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart as a senator after he'd already left that office, and his fellow 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt was referred to as a senator from Arizona; he was actually the state's former governor. Pretty embarrassing, to say the least. What did I do as a yearbook staffer? I wrote a piece on an underclassman. It was never included.

Oh, yeah, I identified myself as "Steve" Maginnis, rather than as "Steven" or as "Steven William" Maginnis. How many other classmates identified themselves informally, with abbreviated first names? About three or four, as it turned out. Maybe five. I wasn't happy about that. Perhaps I subconsciously didn't take the yearbook seriously enough to do more than submit a laid-back entry for the senior class. And that's probably a good thing. Because, ultimately, a yearbook is nothing more than a useless memento of your school experience, and looking at your yearbook, high school or college, probably makes you feel worse than better. You know that most of your school friends are gone, and you realize that the social experience of school wasn't as satisfying or as enjoyable as you think it was. But why should I care? I went to college to develop my intellect, not to enjoy myself. Which is why I believe, if colleges and universities want to devote more time to the serious business of intellectual development, the yearbook is one thing they should get rid of.

My sister took my college yearbook accidentally, by the way, when she packed her things and moved out after she got married. Ironically, she left her high school yearbook behind. I've never asked her for my college yearbook back. I don't really want it back. I have a feeling she feels the same about her high school yearbook.